Alarums & Excursions

Alarums & Excursions In Detroit, Architect Frank Lloyd Wright hammered away again at American building habits. Said he: "America is the only nation in the history of the world that went from barbarism to degeneracy without developing a culture. And we won't have any culture until we have good architecture. Until we have a culture we won't have a true democracy."

This time it was Britain's elegantly modern Royal Festival Hall that ruffled the terrible temper of Conductor Sir Thomas Beecham. Not in the past 350 years, Sir Thomas roared, had anyone seen "a more repellent, a more unattractive, a more monstrous structure."

Suspecting that he had played too many love sets with the Nazis during the war, the French government refused a visa to Germany's aging (42) Court Ace Baron Gottfried von Cramm, scheduled to play in the French International Tennis matches which started in Paris this week.

A drive from Manhattan to Miami gave Columnist Robert C. Ruark meat for an ulcerous attack on roadside restaurants. If you spot one that has "a neon light out front, a mess of chromium inside, and an easily evident juke box," he wrote, "what you get to eat would poison an ostrich . . . They will take a perfectly good horse-burger out of the freezer, and it comes to the customer, after subjection to the stove, a deep shade of grey and curled at the edges . . . There is no law which says that a roll or a piece of bread must be kept in the refrigerator and served stark and chilled, but there is a general suspicion that heating a biscuit is punishable by fine and imprisonment . . . I have observed, too, that the waitresses in neon-lit, chromiumed establishments invariably wear bobby sox and spend most of their time giggling in corners with the cook. This may have some direct effect on the quality of the kitchen."

On his way to present the French cancer society with a $10,000 check from the Damon Runyon Cancer Fund, Good-Will Ambassador Sugar Ray Robinson lost his way in Paris traffic, kept the crowd (including at least one duchess and the wives of three cabinet ministers) waiting 30 minutes before he arrived in his fuchsia Cadillac convertible. All was forgiven when the middleweight champ from Harlem made a little speech in French, then topped it off with: "Hey, now I get to kiss Missus President!" With a gay blush, France's First Lady, Mme. Vincent Auriol, stood up for a kiss on each cheek.

The Stream of History

U.S. haven for Mrs. Oksana Kasenkina became a law of the land. President Truman signed the bill waiving immigration requirements, and paving the way for citizenship for the onetime Soviet schoolteacher who made her three-story leap to freedom from a Soviet consulate window in Manhattan almost three years ago.

Lee de Forest, 77, inventor of the electron tube, who sometimes worries about its development into radio and television, had a moment of mellow reflection following General MacArthur's coverage on TV. Wrote De Forest in a letter to the New York Times: "In the past I have complained bitterly about some of the uses to which 'my children,' radio and television, have been put . . . [But] what an aid to democracy talking pictures, radio and television can be. Instead of a static photograph or a brief glimpse of a man going by in a car, the American citizen can see and hear his leaders in action and get to know and judge them for himself. I am a proud parent today."

The Massachusetts Bar Association petitioned the state supreme court to "disbar, censure or suspend" Alger Hiss, disbarred in New York last year, and now in Lewisburg, Pa. prison serving a five-year sentence for perjury.

Interviewed in Oakland on her arrival from Tokyo, Mrs. Phyllis Gibbons, widow of a British diplomat and tutor for the past five years to Arthur MacArthur, described her young charge. He has, she said, "an outstanding talent for music." Otherwise, "he is just an ordinary American boy, like your son or mine. He is quite intelligent, but he can't spell--what American boy can?"

Inside Expert John Gunther packed his bags for Hollywood and a new assignment for a hypercritical editor: to try to do a movie script "with a European background" for Greta Garbo who has not found a suitable one since 1941.

Judge Learned Hand, 79, once. called "the greatest living American jurist" by the late Supreme Court Justice Cardozo, announced that he was retiring from his seat on the United States court of appeals, second circuit, after 42 years on the federal bench. Nominated by the New York City Bar Association as a successor: Federal District Judge Harold Medina.

From Sicily, where he had been touring and speaking, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, onetime Premier of Italy and last surviving member of World War I's Versailles Treaty-makers, took a plane back to Rome and his family, to celebrate his gist birthday, "in perfect health."

The Busy Heart

After eight months of marriage to Cinemactor Bruce Cabot (born Etienne Jacques Pelisner de Bujac), Venezuela-born Franchesca Juana Soffa Arnaudt (his third wife) decided that life with him was cruel by California definition, signed divorce papers.

For her divorce from her radio actor husband, Actress Agnes Moorehead, 44, had a witness define her charges of cruelty. Her husband, said her former houseman, called his wife dirty names, revved up the radio and slammed doors every time she tried to study her scripts, forced her to sleep in his room, pointed his antique firearms at her, left empty whiskey bottles around the lawn and in the grandfather clock. "It was just too much to bear," said Agnes.

Cinemactor Gary Cooper and wife "Rocky" did not bother to give a reason for their separation. After 17 years of a marriage which had provided gossip writers with scant copy, except for some recent whispers of a shy romance between Gary and his leading lady Patricia (The Fountainhead) Neal, the family lawyer announced that they would divide their property and part. Said Rocky: "I am a Catholic and I will never divorce Gary. I do not believe in divorce."

In Nevada, Rita Hay worth whiled away the first of her six-week divorce residence by reading, among other books, Power Through Constructive Thinking and A Guide to Confident Living.

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